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This letter is my plea and suggestion to Wondermedia, although the theme applies to similar tech companies as well.

(If any fluent speaker can translate this into Chinese for me, I’d very much appreciate it!)

Dear Wondermedia Technologies,

Congratulations on your WM8505 system-on-a-chip. In 2005, a “$100 laptop” was a visionary idea, a dream. Now, thanks to your technology, I can buy a netbook for $85, including shipping to my house in Australia. If I was in Shenzhen, who knows how cheap it would be?

That netbook has more power than the $3000 desktop computer that I owned 12 years ago.

However, it’s not all good. Ars Technica recently labelled the $99 Maylong M-150 tablet the “worst gadget ever”. That tablet is built around your WM8505. Noone who reads that review will buy the product. No importer will read that review and decide to wholesale order any WM8505 product. No hardware engineer would choose WM8505 on the basis of that review, either.

It doesn’t have to be that way. Vendors can ship better tablets and netbooks, that get better reviews, at no cost to you. You can sell more units, at no cost to you.

Take a look at the custom firmware on Slatedroid.com. Every one of those people has modded the same proprietary WM8505 build of Android 1.6 to try and make it better. It runs faster and smoother and has more features. They have spent hours of their time trying to make your products better.

Take a look at the rough port I did of Android 2.2 this week. It’s very poor quality, but it doesn’t have to be. It can be better, at no cost to you.

Look at the months of hard work by the talented Alexey Charkov to make a WM8505 Linux kernel that is good enough to be in the official kernel tree. Big players like TI, Marvell, NVidia all pay talented developers to make Linux code that is good enough for inclusion in the official kernel. Alexey is doing the same for you, for free. His work is coming along slowly, but it could be coming faster. You can help him to help you, at no cost.

What resources are the community using, at this moment? At the beginning, barely anything at all, just incomplete leaked data sheets. Then you were kind enough to release most of your Linux kernel source, which has helped greatly.

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p>I’m writing this letter to suggest you release more, for your own benefit. Many big companies provide datasheets, BSPs, SDKs, source code for free. You should do the same with what you already have. With more information and more source code, it would be possible for the community to build many things. If we had the Android 1.6 source code, WMT SDK source code, or current/complete documentation (even in Chinese) then the community would be able to develop Android firmwares with more features and better hardware support, maybe even a 2.2 port that runs well. There is nothing stopping vendors from shipping devices with a community Android build, if it is better. More WM8505 sales, at no cost to you.

More datasheets and documentation will also make Linux kernel development faster and better. How much of your own developers’ time do you save if the mainline Linux kernel has Wondermedia hardware support in it, instead of having to keep patching it in-house? Better quality kernel, less maintenance costs, no cost to you.

The community is indirectly trying to give you a competitive advantage, for free. All you need to do is open up.

Why not open up? One reason, I think, is that you probably charge for this information. Charging for BSPs & SDKs is a revenue stream. I ask you this: How big is that revenue stream? How many more units do you need to sell before it does not matter any more?

Maybe you think that you can’t afford the support costs, or the maintenance overhead. If this is a concern, rest assured that the community does not need much. Even if you just “leak” a torrent file or send the files for someone else to host, the Internet will make sure that they never go away. The community already provides support for each other.

I realise this is not the same as most small hardware companies’ culture. However, there’s no reason why you can’t behave like the big companies on this. This will differentiate you in the marketplace and give you an advantage. The community is standing by, waiting to help make your products great.

These words apply to all similar companies, not just Wondermedia. If someone becomes the first truly open manufacturer of small, affordable, embedded ARM systems then I predict that the developer community will beat a path to their door.

Not to mention they could probably have tablets that are at least better competitors to the Galaxy Tab and others. If the cards line up right, these tablets and netbooks could very well be category killers.

[…] drivers and some spec sheets specific to the MW8505 which is made by Wondermedia. Â Project Gus has a nice letter to them stating the communities intentions and needs. Â Only time will tell if the code will get […]